


In the Tunnels of the Mind

by Tallulah



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Coping, F/M, Feelings, Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:16:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 6,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28575879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tallulah/pseuds/Tallulah
Summary: Everyone tries to get back to normal after what happened. It isn't easy.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17
Collections: 12 Days of Christmas Challenge 2020





	1. Jess

**Author's Note:**

> Written for 12 Days of Christmas on Dreamwidth, prompt "eleven dark tunnels".

She’s awake again. She doesn’t sleep so well in the dark now. She’s awake and she’s cold. She’s always cold now, too.

She’s sitting in bed, a blanket round her shoulders. The light was on anyway, it’s always on, so Mom and Dad won’t know she’s up. In the first few days they knew she was up because she’d wake up screaming and clutching at the sheets like she was being dragged through the woods, and one of them would come in and cuddle her like she was a little kid. The meds have helped with the bad dreams, taken the edge off them, but they don’t help so well with everything else. She’s sitting in bed, with her phone (a new phone. Another new phone) watching videos of kittens and puppies. Sometimes it tries to show her stuff with people in, friends messing around, but she can’t watch that kind of thing any more, it makes her start freaking out. People just mess around and they think it’s okay until it isn’t, until it isn’t and you don’t know it isn’t until something comes up behind you and rips you away from everything –

_A wave of twigs and stones against her skin, blood in her mouth, clutching at the ground but she can’t hold on, earth under her fingernails is all, she can’t hold on, she can’t stop –_

She starts crying, but quietly, like, just tears dripping down her face and onto the screen, so it’s okay. That’s being like a little kid, too, just crying all the time even when nothing’s happened. It makes her colder. She puts down her phone, reaches for the stuffed bear with uneven eyes. Little kids need little-kid stuff to feel better. Before, she mostly hid him away in a drawer, she hadn’t taken him to college with her, she was trying to be _grown-up_ and _a cool girl_ , and then _it_ had come up behind her and literally dragged her through the mud to show her how dumb it was to even think – 

They’re saying like she should probably get some counselling. Now the cops have stopped interviewing her, now they believe her when she says she didn’t know what _it_ was and didn’t know what happened and didn’t recognise anyone through the blood oozing into her eyes, everyone’s saying she can get some counselling. She doesn’t think she wants that. When you’re a little kid again, you can’t really explain why you’re feeling like this or that, you just feel it and start crying. Sooner or later Mom and Dad are going to start telling her to _pull herself together_ but that’s the problem, she got pulled away from herself and couldn’t hold on no matter how hard she tried. A bunch of her fingernails were torn off even, isn’t that enough proof? She huddles up tighter, hugs the bear. Once she was loud and confident and acted like she knew it all. Being loud attracts predators. She hugs herself as small as she can.


	2. Jess and Mike

Mike hasn’t called or messaged her since it all happened but she hasn’t really thought about that. In the first few days her phone was buzzing with messages from people who hadn’t been caught up in it, _omg heard you were in an accident are you ok???_ She didn’t know what to do with the messages so she just ignored them. So she didn’t really notice Mike hadn’t sent any. None of the others who’d come to the lodge had sent any but she’d only really been there because she’d been Mike’s girl, right?

The point is when her phone starts buzzing with a call from him she stares at it like it’s from a stranger. Lucky it’s been a while now, she can _pull herself together_ enough to hit Reply, to mumble, “Hello?” Her voice sounds thin and little but she knows she hasn’t really been talking much. She doesn’t know who she expects to hear on the end of the phone, it could be Mike or it could be someone else or it could just be the shrieks and snarls of those things in the woods –

Someone draws breath but then they say, he says, “Jess… is that you?”

“Yeah.” She’s in her room again, back to the wall, knees to her chest, her voice is squashed in between. “I… don’t talk on the phone so much, you know?”

Mike says, “Sure,” like that’s a completely normal thing to say, and then, “I… how are you doing?”

Jess doesn’t know what to say to that so she doesn’t say anything, she just tries to breathe and then eventually she says, “You? They...” They questioned him a lot, she remembers hearing. Stuff about Emily and guns and blowing up the lodge. She can’t remember who told her. “Are you in trouble?”

He sort of laughs, like the old Mike would have done at that question, but it sounds shaky, like maybe he’s scared too. “Not – not any more than usual. I...” He sounds like he’s going to explain and then he sounds like he’s too tired to explain. “Look, I didn’t call to talk about me, I called to see how you were and...”

“S’okay,” Jess says, she is tangling her hair round her fingers (something else she did when she was little). “Didn’t… I’ve not been… talking much and...” 

“Yeah, but… but I shouldn’t have just gone silent on you.”

Jess doesn’t know how to explain that the silence was the easy part so she just says, “S’okay,” again. 

She doesn’t know if they’re still dating, she realises. She hadn’t thought about that til now, either. Like one of the last things the old Jess, the grown-up Jess, said was that she was going to have sex with Mike and it was going to be hot. And, and not just that. She’d been talking to him like he was someone she trusted. Like he was someone who’d listen. 

That had probably been stupid, too. Told him stuff and took off her jacket and her sweater and right then just got dragged through the mud and the twigs and the stones, like she hadn’t realised how dangerous it is to – to – 

She doesn’t even know. Just that she’s clearly messed up really bad somewhere along the way because otherwise why would this have happened?

“I can...” Mike says, awkward, Mike never used to be awkward, “I can come see you? If you want? Like… I’d like to see you.”

He might mean it like he wants to talk to her or he might mean he wants to see she’s alive or he might mean he wants to have sex with her. Jess thinks he probably won’t want to have sex with her if he sees her for real. The scars aren’t, like, hideous, but they’re there, looking at her in the mirror and reminding her of what happened, though it isn’t like she ever _forgets_ about it. 

And she doesn’t think she wants to have sex with him, either. She tries to dress as quickly as possible now, she gets cold and shaky when she’s not wrapped up in clothes. She doesn’t think she wants to take her clothes off and get into bed with him and pretend she’s the old Jess. She used to be good at pretending. Now she doesn’t know how she could ever have been.

“Jess?” Mike says again, and he sounds sad, like he actually did want to see her.

“I should… go,” she says.

“God, I’m – I’m sorry –”

She is freezing up and probably going to cry again but she bites her lip, tugs at her hair, she makes herself say, “No, it’s not… you don’t need to be sorry. You… you… you tried your best, you… you ran after me all that way...” She heard him calling. She thinks things would be even worse if she hadn’t heard him calling. At least someone tried to stop it happening.

“Of course I did,” he says. “God, Jess, I wasn’t going to leave you.”

She got left anyway, it didn’t matter, but she doesn’t bother to say that.


	3. Mike

Mike has a lot of dreams where he wakes up looking for wendigos in the shadows, but he expected that. Just like in finals season when he’d wake up wondering how he’d managed to show up to the exam room naked. 

What he didn’t expect was the constant feeling of not knowing what it is he’s meant to be doing. He never had that problem before, as far as he can remember. There was school and home and practice and avoiding doing your chores, kicking back and watching TV, going out with girls, hanging with friends, and it all felt normal. Now, there’s always just feeling like he’s… waiting for something. Or he should be somewhere else. Or whatever he’s just done was the wrong move. He’s feeling it now, he’s come off the phone with Jess and his mind’s buzzing with _you fucked up, you fucked up_ even though he doesn’t think he did, she didn’t read him the riot act for not calling her, she didn’t ask him to come over, and she sounded no more lost and scared than she did at the start of the call. He’s done nothing wrong but his breath’s sticking in his chest and he feels like he can’t sit still. Walking around doesn’t help much either, though, he’s tried that. Just makes him paranoid about literally putting one foot in front of the other. You just have to ride it out.

Makes sense, he’s telling himself. Makes sense. He told some of this to Sam, and she commented how they’d been through a lot, of course they’d all be on edge, and her acting like it was normal kind of helped. Sam’s smart. She’s probably right. It makes sense. He reckons he’s about half-and-half on the good-choices bad-choices ratio, which isn’t a great success rate when the wrong choice could get you killed by a rabid cannibalistic monster, and it’s only luck he _didn’t_ get killed by said monsters, and then the cops went over and over the _good_ choices like they wanted to prove even those weren’t so great. In the interview room, he tried to look them in the face, he knew if he kept looking away he’d seem like a liar, but trying to remember to do that and keep his mind on what he was saying _and_ not think about his missing fingers – not pain, but feeling like they were still there, like he had pins and needles in them – and the more he tried not to think about any of it, the worse it all got –

No one’s asking questions now, no one’s asking him to explain anything, but he lays out the facts anyway: _I ran after Jess, swear to god I tried to catch up with her – I thought it was Josh who pulled all that shit, I thought he was dangerous, thought we needed him out of the way – I thought, I thought maybe Emily, with the bite, I thought, but I didn’t, I didn’t pull the trigger, I was confused – they were in the lodge, they were going to kill us, we had to burn it, it was the only way –_

Okay.

Okay.

Heart rate slowing back to normal. The fear fading, sort of, just leaving him feeling kind of sick. It hangs around, sometimes, and he finds himself way more scared in his apartment than he was wandering around an abandoned lunatic asylum. But then, that was only the start of a very long night. There was that, and the tunnels, and Sam, and Josh, and Em, and the gun and the caves and the lodge and the gas and, and, and –

He hasn’t called Emily, either. After… after all the questions had stopped, he spent a good few days not thinking at all, so it was only recently it occurred to him he should be checking on Jess, that maybe she’s expecting him to come over with flowers. And okay, she isn’t, but she doesn’t sound like she hates his guts. He’s pretty sure Em hates his guts. He’s pretty sure Emily would love to run through all those choices he made and tell him exactly why each of them were wrong. She did that anyway, with all her boyfriends. When they were together he could deal with that, he’d tease her for being a control freak. He doesn’t think he could get away with that now. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get to win any argument with her ever again, if they even _speak_ again, which they probably shouldn’t. The cops acted like they thought he was bullshitting but they didn’t know what had happened, they didn’t know what it had been like. Emily was there and knows and knows he nearly shot her. Sam’s smart and says _Makes sense_ and Jess just seems grateful he tried to run after her but Emily knows the truth. _You should be feeling scared,_ she’d say. _You screwed up big time._ And he’s pretty sure that, as usual, Emily’s the one who’s right.


	4. Emily

Emily’s decided today will be another big shopping trip. Obviously the clothes she was wearing when she fell into a goddamn _mine_ were completely wrecked, and then the others she brought on Josh’s stupid trip were blown up in a fireball, so those all had to be replaced. Fine. Whatever. But then, but then a bunch of other things in her wardrobe, when she thought about wearing them, she remembered wearing them with Mike, and when she thought about Mike, she remembered him holding a gun to her face, and then she was like, _You know what, I don’t need these in my life._ She’s thrown a lot of stuff out. The clothes that didn’t have memories of Mike had memories of Jess, when they counted each other as friends, or Hannah and Beth and Josh, of previous trips to that lodge, of Sam and Chris and Ashley and Matt... 

Shopping gives her something to do, as well. She’s good at it. No browsing and drifting. No point. She searches through the racks, zeroing in on the brands that suit her, the colours and styles she’s known from long experience make her look good. If she spots her size, she grabs it up. Takes an armful into the changing rooms – no point in going in just for one item, make it count – ruthlessly sorts clothes into good, bad, ugly. Doesn’t waste time on false leads. Doesn’t waste time on anything.

Plus, the crowds. She likes the crowds, likes being just one of hundreds of people. Big, open-air spaces, too, lights and chatter and music. The more of that the better. At home she puts the radio on, or the TV, or both, sometimes. It doesn’t matter about being able to hear what people are saying. Just that there are voices. It’s not that she’s scared of silence, that would be stupid. Just, she starts thinking about being alone underground, about calling and no one answering. She gets stupid about it, her mind won’t stop chewing it over. She starts asking things like _maybe that was what Josh was going to do to me, if his stupid prank had played out how it was supposed to_. Or _maybe no one would have found me, if I’d taken just one wrong turn. Maybe it would have been me dying alone underground._ Maybe, maybe, maybe. She isn’t the kind of person who wonders like that. She does what she needs to do and does it well. She isn’t the kind of person who messes up. She definitely isn’t the kind of person who would play a really badly-thought-out, immature prank that would ultimately result in three people being killed and one turning into a monster. People like that would _deserve_ to be trapped underground. 

She’s stopped, she’s standing still, staring at a really ugly dress she would never think of buying. Someone mutters at her like she’s a crazy person. Her hands are shaking, which is pathetic, because there’s nothing to be scared of. There’s nothing to be scared of, but she doesn’t know what to do next, and that’s the most frightening thing of all. She finds herself dropping the clothes, she finds herself saying, _I’m sorry, I’m sorry._ She finds herself outside the store, and the music is still playing and there are still people all around but it’s as though she can no longer hear them.


	5. Emily and Matt

Enough is enough. This is not how things are going to work out.

Emily goes through her closet and pulls out everything that has any kind of memory of the last year associated with it. Tops, skirts, jeans, shoes. She was getting sloppy. She was kidding herself she could let herself slide into panic and stress and _failure_ without it having consequences. It makes several trash bags’ worth of clothes but it doesn’t matter. She can buy more. She will buy more. Because having a breakdown in the store, that was a one-off. That’s never going to happen again. 

Once she’s done the clothes she goes through the photos on her pinboard, tears off any with any of the others in them. She’d already got rid of the ones with Mike in, and Jess, but there were a few with some of the others. And of course there were some with Matt. Only on the pinboard. She’s never been someone to stick stuff all over her room, it looks so immature. Of course there’s a bunch of other photos on her phone. For a moment she actually thinks of hurling the phone out of the window (like a _crazy person_ ) before she takes a deep breath and goes into her albums and starts deleting pictures instead. 

Halfway through that, her phone buzzes, and it’s Matt. _We still on for tomorrow?_

Emily stares at the message and finds herself scowling because she is blinking back tears. She had known what she was going to do but she had been putting it off. (That’s where she went wrong. She let things slide.)

She’d let herself think – after the mountain, when they’d both survived, and when she found out that he had survived, and Mike, and Mike had nearly _shot_ her, like she was nothing, like everything they’d shared had been nothing –

She’d let herself think it could be different with Matt. Like, they could start again. Something good could come out of this. _Bringing them together through trauma._ It could be something that worked out, when so much else that night had gone wrong.

Nothing from it was worth saving.


	6. Matt

Matt was doing fine until this. 

Like, the others had mentioned nightmares, and he hadn’t had that. He’d been going to practice every day and hitting the gym or jogging outside of that, so he’d been sleeping just fine. The guys on the team had been like, _Heard you nearly fell down a ravine, what was it, a skiing accident?_ and he was like, _You know what, I thought Josh Washington was a nerd but it turned out the guy **really** knew how to party_. Him saying that showed them it was okay to joke about what had happened, like he thought Josh was gonna stumble out of the woods any day now. He told them, _I nearly got kicked to death by a herd of deer, man_ , and they all agreed that camping sucks.

And with Emily, they just didn’t talk about any of it. Emily made it very clear what she did and didn’t want to talk about, and after the first time Matt said _You okay?_ and she bit his head off, they made like the mountain had never happened. Like none of it had happened. He stayed over at hers, they went shopping and he carried the bags, he took her out to dinner at the places she suggested. She held his hand and talked about where they could go in summer vacation, about how he should come to dinner at her parents’ house. Like she was in this for the long haul.

Now, of course, she dumps him by text and tells him not to contact her again. Emily never did do things by halves.

Getting dumped by your girlfriend shouldn’t be anything to do with a bad near-death experience. You should be sad, or mad, or whatever, and okay, staring at your phone for most of the lecture you’re in and then not realising class has ended, maybe that’s normal, but –

The guy next to him sort of shakes him by the shoulder and is like, _Come on, man, we’re done,_ so Matt follows him out of the room because he doesn’t know what else to do and then. And then. A corridor full of students and the usual noise of voices and phones and music and. Dark tunnels. Cold stone, the smell of smoke. The taste of blood in his mouth. The floor of the radio tower tilting under his feet. Specks of burning ash. The taste of blood. Emily dangling below him, he’s reaching for her and everything groans and creaks below them and he should clutch at her and he doesn’t. He lets her fall. And now she’s let him fall and he doesn’t get why he didn’t see this coming.

He doesn’t know how he gets to the campus health centre. He wouldn’t have gone there himself, probably? But he’s there, and there’s someone asking him what’s happened, and he knows he should explain, _my girlfriend just dumped me, guess I’m a little cut up_ , but he can still taste blood, and, when he closes his eyes against the sunshine, he sees himself letting Emily fall.


	7. Chris

He is playing a lot of video games. Like, probably more than is healthy. On the other hand, he hasn’t taken to drink or hard drugs yet, and he’s alive. Which his former (former?) best friend almost certainly isn’t. And besides, he mostly games at night, because he can’t sleep, so it isn’t like he’d be spending the time doing anything more productive. 

Not to mention he deleted a bunch of saves where it was two-player stuff him and Josh had worked on together, and now he’s kind of regretting that, both in the rational, actually-I-lost-a-lot-of-achievements way, and in… less rational ways. Because. Because instead of justified exorcism it felt like a childish tantrum. Because he feels like he’s sort of pinballing from reaction to reaction, from person to person, with absolutely no clue how he actually feels or what he’s actually meant to be doing. And, sure, okay, he thinks maybe the others feel a bit like that too (not that he’s talked directly to anyone but Sam and Ashley) but… 

It sounds _really_ pathetic and petty to admit this, especially when he’s not the one who got dragged through the woods for miles, or actually stepped up to explode a bunch of wendigos, or nearly died in a collapsing radio tower, but… there’s a whole bunch of stuff that he doesn’t know how to process and no one who wants to hear about it. The death traps, for instance. The fact that they turned out to be fake, so he feels stupid, but also that while he was in them, he genuinely believed he’d chopped his best friend in half with a giant circular saw. Not only does that sound ridiculous when you say it out loud, anyone he tells it to is going to be like _But… you didn’t._ Like that didn’t make it frickin’ _terrifying_ while it was happening.

Or how about, if you squint, the fact that the whole thing was just another one of Josh’s crazy ideas? They’ve spent any number of vacations staging terrible movies, recreations of peril, deliberately cheesy action scenes. They’ve spent any number of weekends pranking each other, as well. Chris feels like he can’t stop asking himself _How was this any different?_ And _if I hadn’t overreacted maybe we wouldn’t have shut Josh up in the shed, maybe he’d have made it out with the rest of us, got some help, maybe we could’ve patched things up_. 

When instead Josh is almost certainly dead and also being used as the fall guy to explain away all the reports of anything worse. 

Which is why Chris doesn’t exactly have a leg to stand on when it comes to complaining about things.

How are you supposed to get over a near-death experience when all you can do is stew about how _unfair_ everything is, like you really are back in third grade?

Round and round the same old checkpoints in his mind. It never makes a difference.


	8. Chris and Ashley

It was a couple of weeks after that night that it occurred to Chris that he was going to have to make a decision about Ashley. He could almost hear Josh’s voice in his head: _come on, cochise, I didn’t set all that up for you to wuss out at the last second!_ Part of the problem, of course, because the last thing Chris wants to do is prove any of Josh’s insane torture-porn gambit correct, but… if he and Ashley can’t get it together now, after everything, then there really is no hope for them and he should move on.

He didn’t really feel like asking a cute girl out on a date – he didn’t really feel much like anything except _stunned_ and _exhausted_ and _still prone to jumping under the table at unexpected sounds_ – but he didn’t really see that getting any better, so he messaged Ashley and asked if she wanted to grab dinner. He even managed to put something like _I would say ‘dinner and a movie’ but maybe we’ve both had enough of movies for a while_ , as though he’d rolled with the punches of what happened, could acknowledge the pain of it and move on. It seemed to work, anyway, because she’d said yes. When they’d met, she’d thrown herself into his arms, and having a girl like Ashley in your arms was still awesome, so he started to feel like maybe this was going to be okay.

It is okay. As in, they go out every week or so, and stay over, and walk down the street holding hands, and everything’s like it’s supposed to be. Everything’s fine as long as they don’t mention the whole near-death experience thing. Chat about classes, video games, movies, dreams of the future. But start discussing Blackwood Mountain and things get… snippy. Chris doesn’t even know why exactly. Just that the few times they have got onto the topic, everything stops working. Like, she’ll make a remark about Josh and he’ll jump in defending the guy, even though god knows Josh doesn’t deserve it. Or she’ll talk about being scared and how if Chris hadn’t been there it would have been so much worse, and Chris feels like shit because he sometimes thinks how much easier life would be right now if he _hadn’t_ been there, how Josh would still be missing but at least Chris wouldn’t have been involved, and then he comes back with something like _well, I mean, I’m not sure I should have been, to be honest, I mean I was the only one of you who didn’t pull the original prank_ , which is throwing stuff in Ashley’s face and he knows it, but maybe he wants her to feel as off-balance as him? Who even knows. Or she’ll say, _when you put the gun down on the table, when I thought you were going to let us both die –_ and he just about manages not to yell at her _do you know how shit-scared I was, do you know how close I was to shooting you, if it was that or die, do you know how hard it was to sit there and do nothing –_

He stared at her and she stared back and he thought they were both almost crying. Eventually she swallowed. _Sorry. I’m sorry._ And he said, _I’m sorry too_ and they were holding each other and kissing and that still felt good, like it was always supposed to. Just nothing else feels like it should.


	9. Ashley

Ashley tries not to mind, but she spends a lot of the time wondering how any of the others can be so… so normal still. Okay, Jess never came back to school, and Chris sometimes looks sad and he can’t always sleep at night, but she knows Matt’s back on the football team like nothing happened, and Emily is still Miss Perfect with her impeccable dress sense and brilliant grades, and Sam seems, if anything, even stronger than before, like nothing is ever going to scare her again. Ashley feels like nothing is ever going to _stop_ scaring her. 

Like, at first it made sense, being freaked out by the dark, or by things that could be growls and snarls, or noises in the house. When you’ve literally had a masked psycho knock you unconscious and have you wake up tied to a chair, you get a little jumpy. When you’ve nearly had your head torn off by a slavering monster, when you know that’s a thing that can happen, it’s going to mess with your mind a little. But now it’s days later and she gets panic attacks in the middle of class, or crossing the forecourt, or at dinner. She finds herself crying for no reason most days.

And her parents and her sister kind of think she really has just got upset about a stupid prank. She tried to explain to them what happened, but this was like the day after she got home and she was pretty incoherent, and then the police talked to them and told them what everyone thinks, that Josh pulled some stupid pranks and there was maybe a creepy man with a flamethrower and they all imagined the wendigos, lost their heads and blew up a building. _Mass hysteria_ , people keep saying. Ashley knows when she gets stressed her words get all tangled up, and no matter how much she tried to explain, take a deep breath and speak calmly and carefully, she just sounded like a stupid little girl. And she blurted out a bunch of things she shouldn’t have. Like saying she stabbed Josh with a pair of scissors. She tried to explain she was terrified and literally sure she was going to be brutally murdered, but she saw her mom and dad look at each other like _maybe we should get an intervention._ They tried to make her go see a counsellor, but at the first session she got – it was like Chris patronisingly telling her there was no such thing as ghosts, actually, when they’d both already seen a bunch of weird stuff happened – she got really angry, and shouty, and cried. So what’s the point of going back?

And if she does, if she actually talks about it, she’ll have to explain a bunch of things she doesn’t want to. Like the scissors. Like screaming at Emily to get out of the basement and go die when the diary was right there and she could’ve checked it, should’ve checked it, rather than letting someone almost get killed. Like trying to tell Chris she wanted to sacrifice herself for him and not meaning it, thinking underneath her words _please, please don’t, please make it be you, please get me out of this_. 

Maybe the real reason she’s so crazy all the time is – unlike the others – she knows now just how little she can rely on herself when the chips are down.


	10. Sam

“Here again?” the staff say when Sam turns up at the climbing wall. It’s become a joke now. She smiles – it feels like a fake smile, but it seems to work – says, “Guess I’ve got the bug!” They may not know about the mountain incident, or maybe, unlike most other people, they just don’t feel the need to comment on it. Sam would like to say she would happily never mention it again, but in reality it constantly lurks at the back of her mouth, whenever someone implies she doesn’t know what she’s talking about or patronises her for being short and blonde or sounds off about the Washingtons. She’s not stupid enough to think it will help, coming out with what will sound like crazy ramblings about monsters, but the possibility of doing so is always there.

The climbing helps more than most other things do. It quiets her thoughts down – even if she’s stewing about something, or nothing, she forgets about it as she pulls herself up and up, feeling for hand and toe holds. The bright lights and the chalk on her hands and the smell of sneakers and gym mats, all of that is a reality she’d prefer to keep hold of. 

The last time she slipped and fell, she couldn’t stop thinking about wet black rock and snowy air and fingers aching with cold. She cried a bit, and a few people crowded round her, asking if she’d hurt herself, if she was okay. She snapped at them. She followed up to apologise later and figured she better not fall again, not if it was going to get to her that much. 

She doesn’t find herself scared, exactly. Just constantly watchful. She puts a chair under the door at night, and no way is she going to take long hot baths with her eyes closed and her headphones in. She’s thinking of taking self-defense classes, too, even though it isn’t like they’d be much use against a wendigo. It’s just general armouring up.

And no more parties. She went to one or two, and found herself standing in the corner, watching, poised to run like she expected a gunman or an earthquake. Once she tried to get herself to relax by knocking back the drink. It didn’t work. She stayed equally as tense with the additional panic of knowing if anything did happen she had that much less chance of dealing with it.

Her friends say, _Are you okay?_ and _You can talk about it, you know, if you need to._ Sam says what she always says, which is, _I’m fine._ She knows they think she’s shutting them out, but she realises she doesn’t particularly care what they think. (She started caring what Josh thought of her, she started to think she was making a difference in his life, and she got blindsided. Okay, she can admit that’s hurt her pride, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not safer to avoid doing that in future.)

Hand and foot and hand and up. She hangs at the top of the wall, clinging to the bar, looks out over the room. Even indoors, it feels like she can breathe easier up here.


	11. Josh

It turns out that with a lot of things you’re scared of, once the worst has happened, you stop being scared of them. Josh used to be scared of a bunch of stuff. The dark, and being buried underground, and screwing up, and losing people. Once all that stuff has actually happened, you live with it. Just like, just like being cold for so long, you stop being cold, you go numb. A lot of him’s numb now and that’s how it was meant to be, numb’s a lot better than feeling anything. The thing about the dark is it’s actually just a backdrop. Like a movie theatre. The lights go down and the show starts. The show is the show and at first it terrified him, too, he tried to run away from it, and fell down, deeper into the mountain. He thought it was going to be bad, then, lying on a bed of rocks with a busted ankle, watching the walls melt into blood and pigs and laughing mouths, and Beth and Hannah walking hand in hand towards him, their faces rotted –

The real Hannah jumped through it all, from rock to rock, like frickin’ Spider-Man or something, chased through the visions like they were mist, screamed them away. Josh had been scared of her too, but now he got it, she wasn’t angry with him, she forgave him, otherwise he’d be dead just like everyone else was. Now, when she grabbed him up in her long arms, he clung onto her, he told her how much she’d grown, made fun of her for not being his little sister any more. She’s going to find food for him, she says, or he says. Seeing as he can’t do it himself. He’s still seeing things out of the corner of his eye but behind her it’s all insubstantial, like mist. They stop, every so often, and eat, and drink snow-melt. He tells her about the prank while he chews meat off the bone like they’ve ordered ribs to go. In the dark, the prank changes, too, it shifts and reshapes and becomes what it was meant to be. He tells her they’ll find the others soon, how it’ll be even better now they can see she’s not dead. Jess and Mike and Emily and Matt and Sam and Chris and Ashley. All be waiting, he says, at the end of the tunnel, once we find the light again.


End file.
